After Nano Banana’s Sensation, a Mysterious “Carrot” Code Model Steps into the Spotlight

A catchy name is just the beginning — but the model’s capabilities are anything but basic.

In the past, every time a new AI model launched, developers would rack their brains to find a bold, unique name that stood out without clashing with existing ones. Sometimes, the name was so eye-catching it outshined the model itself — the buzz spread before people even figured out what the model could do.

Now, creativity has gone into overdrive, especially for mysterious models that haven’t even officially launched. Animals, fruits — nothing is off the table. This playful naming wave was kicked off by OpenAI’s “Strawberry,” when Sam Altman posted a single strawberry image that instantly went viral among netizens.

From there, the trend caught on — AI startup Recraft’s secretive “red_panda,” Google’s recent “Nano Banana” — all adorable names that seem to elevate these models to pop-culture status. Take Nano Banana, for example: while its official name is “Gemini 2.5 Flash,” most people prefer its fruity nickname.

And now, there’s a fresh contender: “Carrot” — a mystery model with outstanding coding abilities. It seems the naming trend has shifted from fruit to vegetables, but don’t let the playful title fool you — its performance is seriously impressive.

Carrot comes from Anycoder, a platform focused on AI-assisted programming. In the model selection panel of Anycoder, there it is — listed alongside heavyweights like DeepSeek V3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok-4, and GPT-5.

Early testers are already praising its coding prowess. Examples include:

• Creating a rabbit-dodging game where carrots act as bullets — an amusing twist that has streams of carrots chasing a nimble rabbit around the screen.
• Generating a voxel-based pagoda garden with intricate design.
• Producing dazzling super-particle animations in P5.js.
• Powering a “gemma-3-270m” chatbot via transformer.js that delivers fast, accurate responses to a variety of queries.

Naturally, the model’s impressive skills have sparked speculation about its origins. Some suspect Google, pointing to the recent Nano Banana release and suggesting a code-focused sibling could make sense. Others wonder if it’s from Moonshot AI’s Kimi, though that seems unlikely given Kimi K2’s recent public launch. A few even speculate it could be part of Alibaba’s Qwen3 lineup.

For now, the true identity of Carrot remains a mystery — but one thing is certain: in the age of AI, a whimsical name can open the door, but it’s raw capability that wins the crowd.